Forgiving Jimmy Kimmel
“That’s what this show will be: a joyous celebration of chauvinism!”
That was Jimmy Kimmel, in 1999, announcing the guiding ethic of the new Comedy Central series he and Adam Carolla debuted that year. The Man Show, they declared, would be a show by men, for men, about men. It would be an exploration of Manliness itself, as an aspiration and an archetype: beer-chugging, boob-ogling, a little bit schlubby, a little bit sleepy, a little bit Bundyan. And the cartoonishly narrow definition of what it meant to be Manly would ultimately be unified, in the show’s conception, by an overarching resentment of feminism and its encroachments: “NO MA’AM,” for the basic-cable audience. “After all, what do guys want to see on TV?” Kimmel asked The Man Show’s studio audience, during its premiere.
Carolla answered for them. “We want girls!” he said. “Girls jumping on trampolines! And monkeys! And midgets!”
propelled Kimmel, formerly a radio host of shock-jocky strain, to national fame: an everyman for . And since he left the series in 2003—to become the host of ABC’s , a role he has occupied ever since—Kimmel has been engaged in a particularly slow-moving project of redemption. The show named for him, though now a traditionally formatted late-night program, began as a loosely sanitized version of its basic-cable forebear: , whose offerings Kimmel and his guests eagerly imbibed on-air (Kimmel conducted one early episode visibly drunk). Kimmel booking women for the show (). Over
